Articles Posted in July, 2019

By any measure, the London-based legal AI startup Luminance has had spectacular success. Not yet three years old, it has raised $23 million in funding, has achieved a valuation of $100 million, is used by more than 150 organizations on six continents, and has won numerous technology awards, including the prestigious Queen’s Award…

Last Friday, I wrote here about the launch by Thomson Reuters of Quick Check, its version of a growing array of brief-analysis products that let lawyers upload a brief and discover relevant cases the brief missed. Now comes another such product, as Bloomberg Law gave a preview of its forthcoming brief analyzer during…

In 2016, Casetext, the legal research startup, introduced CARA, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ uploaded briefs and memoranda and find relevant cases the document missed. Lawyers could use it to vet an opponent’s brief for omitted cases or to double-check their own research before submitting the document.

CARA won recognition…

If you are attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries starting Saturday in Washington, D.C., then consider attending Monday’s “super session” on the use of litigation analytics in federal and state courts.

The 2.5 hour session will include three separate panels — one of which I will moderate —…

Subscribers to the legal research company Casetext can now get access to public and business records at a reduced cost, as the result of a new partnership between the company and Tracers, a provider of public records data to law firms, software integrators, technology partners and others.

Tracers has long been providing public…

Annually since 2011, legal research company Fastcase has named the Fastcase 50, an award that honors “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.” Today, Fastcase named its 2019 honorees, a list that includes practicing lawyers, legal academics, law librarians, corporate counsel, journalists, company executives, bar leaders, and government officials.

[Full disclosure:…

The document technology company Litera Microsystems said today that it has acquired Workshare, a London company that provides products used by legal professionals for document comparison, protection and sharing.

Chicago-based Litera says the move underscores its focus on providing a seamless drafting experience for users across best-of-breed technologies.

For firms that currently use…

Thirty-six states have adopted the duty of technology competence for lawyers, and now Michigan is considering joining the list with proposed changes to its Rules of Professional Conduct.

In April, the Michigan Supreme Court put out a request for public comment with regard to proposed amendments to Rules 1.1 and 1.6 of its…

DoNotPay, the company founded in 2015 by a London teenager who developed a “robot lawyer” to help people automatically appeal parking tickets, said last week that it had raised $4.6 million in a funding round backed by a number of big-name Silicon Valley investors.

Founder Joshua Browder, now 22 and based in the San…

LexBlog today is rolling out a major enhancement of its publishing platform that should mean its customers’ blogs will load significantly faster on mobile devices, rank higher in search results, and display better on certain social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

The enhancement makes LexBlog’s platform compatible with the AMP format (formerly…

A survey of earnings of solo and small-firm attorneys in the United States finds that the average attorney’s compensation dropped last year, while a wide gender gap persists.

Conducted for the second year, the Martindale-Avvo Attorney Compensation Report said that the average compensation for a solo or small-firm attorney in 2018 was $194,000, down…

May a state assert copyright in the publication of its legal materials?

That is the issue presented in a case that the Supreme Court will review next term. Its outcome could shape the future of innovation in legal research and the public’s right of access to the laws that govern them.

The case, Georgia v.…